The Two Ways
Dual Paths in Terrence Malik's Tree of Life and Classic Spiritual Literature
Note: I will be discussing Terrence Malik’s Tree of Life in this post and while it is probably the most unspoilable film of all time, be aware I’ll be discussing it in its entirety. If you’ve never seen it, you should know it is uniquely accessible for discussion regardless of having viewed it or not.
The Two Ways Framework
“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life.”
So begins Terrence Malik’s 2011 film, Tree of Life, which is fitting given that people have dual reactions to it. People either love it or hate it. I’ve shown this favorite film of mine to friends to mixed responses. Some are enamored by it, sit in awed silence when the credits roll, and proceed to engage me in deep dialogue about the meaning of life. Others, however, fall asleep, walk out the door midway through, or shyly admit it wasn’t for them while tip-toeing around my feelings.
When that classic icebreaker question comes up about one’s favorite movie and I answer Tree of Life, I’m often asked the follow-up, “What is it about?” Sometimes I say something along the lines of, “It’s about a family grieving the death of a son while searching for him in their memories of early life in 1950s Waco, Texas.” More often than not though, I just say, “everything.”
I mean, how many films have a 16-minute creation sequence? Thematically, however, it is about the way of life that each human being chooses to live, which is alluded to in the film’s title: the Tree of Life is the opposite option from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad in Genesis. Channeling inspiration from several spiritual writings, Terrence Malik gives names to these dual ways in the film’s opening voiceover from Miss O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), who says the nuns taught her there were two ways:
“The way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.
Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.
Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.
They taught us that no one who loves grace will come to a bad end.
I will be true to you, whatever comes.”
With this, Malik has stated the thesis for the entire film. The viewer may now process all they witness through the lens of these two ways, one of which we’ve been told is superior in virtue. Though Malik could have chosen any two words for these ways, such as Deuteronomy and the Didache’s “Life” and “Death” or Hebrew wisdom literature’s “wisdom” and “folly” (or “wickedness”), he instead opts for terms from Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (1427).
Notice the similarities between these selections from book 3, chapter 34 of Imitation and Tree of Life’s opening voiceover:
Nature is crafty and attracts many, ensnaring and deceiving them while ever seeking itself. But grace walks in simplicity, turns away from all appearance of evil, offers no deceits, and does all purely for God in whom she rests as her last end.
Nature works for its own interest and looks to the profit it can reap from another. Grace does not consider what is useful and advantageous to herself, but rather what is profitable to many.
Nature is covetous, and receives more willingly than it gives. It loves to have its own private possessions. Grace, however, is kind and openhearted. Grace shuns private interest, is contented with little, and judges it more blessed to give than to receive
As you can tell, Malik is hardly hiding the source text he is condensing and remixing here. Though I was introduced to Tree of Life around 2014, I didn’t catch this inspiration until I read Imitation in 2021. That is how I have slowly discovered several other similar inspirations from classic spiritual literature in Tree of Life that I’ll mention in this post and to which I have seen no one else mention online or in print.1 As far as I can tell, this is all by Malik’s design.
Meditation Cinema
Ever since his return to filmmaking with The Thin Red Line (1998), Terrence Malik has occupied a singular place within the film industry. An auteur if there ever was one, precious few films share the same meditative, devotional quality that his possess. The perspective in a Malik film is ever-shifting, never content to stay with one subject, brooding like the Spirit over Genesis’ chaotic waters. All films have a structure, but Malik’s have a framework comparable to liturgy, as they move the viewer through emotions, contemplation, and finally exaltation. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is always framing humans as small figures in a wide world, but under Malik’s direction, his camera is commonly tilting upward toward the sun glittering through several feet of ocean depths, elaborate domed ceilings, or most frequently, the great dome of heaven.
These visual techniques are meant to be noticed, especially upon rewatches, just as several basic motifs are patterned throughout the film and tied to a recurring theme. Water, for instance, is the film’s motif for eternity. It shows up in the film’s opening sequence in the form of a majestic waterfall, then explicitly in what might traditionally be called the call to adventure2, here depicted as a flash of Jack’s recently deceased brother, R.L, standing on a shoreline somewhere as R.L whispers, “Find me.” This flash occurs midway through a sequence of Jack pensively wandering through his glass-encased office while the slapping of water mysteriously plays in the background. Only when we see R.L. on the shoreline, do we understand where the sound of the water is coming from. In the film’s final sequence, when Jack steps into the original frame of R.L on the shoreline, it becomes apparent that R.L has been standing on the shores of Eternity, where the dead are reunited with their loved ones, where the old are young again, and the young now old. In retrospect, the viewer may experience each explicit shot of water as a foreshadowing of the film’s final sequence and more broadly as the ever-looming presence of Eternity in each seemingly temporal moment.
These patterned themes function much like themes do in the Bible: showing up immediately all jumbled together, continually recurring, developing, inverting, interacting with each other, and finally culminating in a grand and unified coalescence pointing toward Jesus.3 That is the primary quality that makes the Bible meditation literature. It is a library of books in conversation with one another and reading them is a discovery process that consists of reading slowly across a lifetime and making connections that bring out new depth and meaning. The best long-form art mimics this formula and the Tree of Life is among the ranks. That is why I think it is best described as meditation cinema. It is designed to be rewatched and contemplated upon across years.
I can attest to that as someone who has watched the film scores of times. While it left me in awe, my first few watchings baffled me. It was a bit like that majestic waterfall washing over me, leaving me disoriented and searching. The movements between the film’s first few sections initially seemed somewhat random. It was only after watching it on repeat over years that the structure, patterns, literary connections, and overall meaning became apparent.
While the themes in the film could be said to be in conversation with one another, it seems apparent to me that Malik intended for the film to be in a larger conversation with centuries of classic spiritual literature, the Bible (specifically the book of Job) included. You might say it seeks a place in that canon.
Spiritual Literature in Tree of Life
As far as I can tell, the three biggest inspirations for Tree of Life are Malik’s own life, the Book of Job, and Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
In many respects (which I won’t dwell on), Tree of Life is a memoir. The fictional O’Brien family clearly mirrors Malik’s own family, with its musician and inventor father played by Brad Pitt reflecting Terrence’s father Emil, and its three sons, one of whom plays guitar and mysteriously passes away at 19, much like Terrence’s late brother, Larry. Jack, of course, is Terrence himself. Alas, much ink has been spilled on these similarities elsewhere.
If anything, Tree of Life is less a memoir of actual experiences and more a memoir of thought. What was Malik contemplating as a child and how does he view those thoughts through decades of higher education, religious experience, and meditation upon some key texts? One of those texts is Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which is also about a family of three brothers, one of whom seems inflicted with irresistible grace. One section, in particular, echoes within the film: Book 6, The Russian Monk (which I’m currently releasing periodic read-through installments of on Heathland Hymns).
The monk in question, Father Zosima, looms large over the epic novel. In Book 6, with his friends gathered close by, he recounts early memories of his life and provides many admonitions. Zosima’s conversion is due in large part to his late brother, Markel, who experienced a kind of spiritual awakening upon learning his death was imminent. Once a rude and cynical man, Markel suddenly becomes gentle and gracious, calling his mother sweet names (“Little Heart of Mine”) and speaking to the birds outside his window.
And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly begging their forgiveness too: “Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too.” None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed tears of joy. “Yes,” he said, “there was such a glory of God all about me: birds, trees, meadows, sky; only I lived in shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory.”
Malik puts words remarkably similar in the mouth of Mr. O’Brien when he loses his job and becomes a humbled man:
“I wanted to be loved because I was great; A big man. I'm nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn't notice the glory. I'm a foolish man.”
Another echo of The Russian Monk, that I’m aware of, is not one of words, but of gestures. Within Zosima’s account of his brother’s awakening, there is a quiet moment between Zosima and Markel that is played almost exactly between Jack and R.L:
I remember I went once into his room when there was no one else there. It was a bright evening, the sun was setting, and the whole room was lighted up. He beckoned me, and I went up to him. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my face tenderly, lovingly; he said nothing for a minute, only looked at me like that.
“Well,” he said, “run and play now, enjoy life for me too.” I went out then and ran to play. And many times in my life afterwards I remembered even with tears how he told me to enjoy life for him too.
Since I’m unable to find screenshots, gifs, or recordings or this mirrored scene in Tree of Life, allow me to describe it:
Jack sits on the edge of his bed near an open window with his hands out in front of him, fingers laced, prayer-like. Ever so softly, R.L’s hand appears and his fingers graze Jack’s own. He looks up in inquiry toward R.L who looms above him. R.L’s hand lifts to Jack’s shoulder. Jack looks from his brother’s hand to his face which is utterly serious. Unable to meet his gaze, Jack hangs his head in shame. R.L again lifts his hand, places it upon Jack’s head, much like a priest offering a blessing or absolution. There is an abrupt cut and the boys are seen running and playing under the tree in their backyard.
The shoulder touch that occurs in this moment, an imparting of Grace, happens in a myriad of other moments in the film. In fact, immediately following the scene accounted above, Jack is seen playing with a neighbor boy with a burn mark from a house fire, which Jack previously regarded with morbid fascination and judgment, but now he reaches out and places his hand on the shoulder of the boy. In the broader context of the film, this shows the viewer that Jack is learning to embrace the Way of Grace which his mother and brother inherently possess, but as an isolated moment it depicts this laying on of hands as a transference of blessing. Evoking scenes from the Book of Acts where Spirit and power are imparted with a holy touch, Malik portrays it as a physical invitation to the Way of Grace.
In a section of the Russian Monk where Zosima muses about his enthusiasm for Scripture, he recollects when he was first “moved to devotional feeling” in a church service at the age of eight. A young boy came out and read from the Book of Job, which completely seized Zosima’s imagination. Likewise, there is a scene in the Tree of Life where the O’Brien family attends a church service and pensively listens to the priest’s sermon on the Book of Job.4
At a surface level, the explicit mention of Job pairs well with the film’s series of softly whispered, searching prayers since Job is one of the most open-ended and searching books of Scripture. Unlike traditional Christian movies, which are evangelistically eager to lob Gospely information at the viewer, the Tree of Life asks questions. In one brilliant scene, Jack kneels over his bed dutifully praying. He looks dreadfully bored as he mutters the kind of uninspired, obligatory prayers all religious folks are likely guilty of:
“Help me not to sass my dad. Help me not to get dogs in fights. Help me to be thankful for everything I got. Help me not to tell lies.”
But through voiceover we hear the real prayers within Jack’s heart bubbling up, the kind of questions only a child who hasn’t been fully indoctrinated yet is free to ask:
“Where do you live? Are you watching me? I wanna know what you are. I wanna see what you see.”
Or in a raw moment after witnessing a boy drown at the swimming hole and seeing the after-effects of the previously mentioned house fire, we hear Jack’s accusations for God:
“Where were you? You let a boy die. You’ll let anything happen.”
Malik is inviting viewers to consider the character’s questions and to provoke the latent questions within the viewer’s own soul. Rather than reductively expecting the viewer to say the Sinner’s Prayer at the end of the film, Malik is inviting the viewer into spiritual process. This isn’t to say that Malik isn’t proposing an ultimatum. As I’ve said, the first words of the film say there are “two ways” and “you have to choose which one you’ll follow.” Much like Jesus’ parables, you can’t really walk away from them without having made a choice, even if somewhat unconsciously at first. In my first watches, I didn’t realize what Malik was inviting me to consider, but after several watches it became clearer.
Beyond matching the tone, the Book of Job is also thematically resonant with the film’s central duality. Belonging to the so-called Wisdom Books, Job is necessarily concerned with the choice between wisdom and folly. In Job, this plays out as the choice to trust God and defer to his wisdom or to rebel and curse him. While preaching from the Book of Job, the O’Brien’s priest asks, “Do you trust in God?” and then continues, in that old-fashioned but lofty tone of a 1950’s Episcopal preacher:
Job, too, was close to the Lord. Are your friends and children your security? There is no hiding place in all the world where trouble may not find you. No one knows when sorrow might visit his house, any more than Job did.
The very moment everything was taken away from Job, he knew it was the Lord who’d taken it away. He turned from the passing shows of time. He sought that which is eternal.
It is true that Job trusted God, especially with his marvelous first words being “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return into the earth; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and ever.” However, Job did not up and move on. He boldly mourned and raged against simple explanatory platitudes like the ones Mrs O’Brien is told after R.L’s death. In an interaction mirroring one in C.S Lewis’ A Grief Observed, a man tells Mrs O’Brien, “he’s in God’s hands now” and she retorts back “he was in God’s hands the whole time. Wasn’t he?”5 Like Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, Mrs O’Brien has her own cruel comforters:
Neighbor: I know the pain will pass. It will pass in time, you know? It might seem hard me saying that, but it’s true.
Mrs O’Brien: I don’t want it to.
Neighbor: Life goes on. People pass on. Nothing stays the same. You still got the other two. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away and that’s just the way He is.
In this same mourning sequence, the viewer sees Mrs' O’Brien praying much like Jack does later, saying one thing with her mouth (Psalm 23) and something else in her heart (“My God. My hope. What did you gain?”) Like Job, she exalts and trusts Them, but she takes Them to task about the Problem of Evil. The 16-minute creation sequence that follows is the visual equivalent of God’s magisterial response to Job from the whirlwind where She takes Job on a cosmic tour of the universe, asking questions like this verse that appears in a title card before the film starts:
"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth...when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 37:4,7)
The viewer can even hear Mrs O’Brien echoing that Job verse as a shot pans over the cooling, young Earth:
“We cry to you.
My soul.
My son.
Hear us.”
What is Job’s response when God finishes His transcendent monologue? Some translations have him simply saying, “I’m nothing” just as Mr. O’Brien says when he is humbled by Grace. After much mourning, Job accepts God’s judgment with little more answers than he started with. In the Tree of Life’s equivalent moment, Mrs. O’Brien finds freedom in abandoning herself to Grace:
“I give him to you.
I give you my son.”
The Journey to Grace
Jack and his mother’s metaphysical journey through creation, memories, and eternity lead them finally to R.L and more aptly, to Grace itself. The core of this journey for the viewer is watching young Jack struggle with his baser impulses and his desire for more virtuous living. At one point, Jack obviously paraphrases Paul in Romans 7:15, saying, “What I want to do, I can't do. I do what I hate.”
I’ve alluded to this several times, but Malik has clearly cast Mrs. O’Brian as the representative for Grace and Mr. O’Brien as the representative for Nature.
Mrs. O’Brien, from the moment we first see her as a young girl, is wide-eyed in wonder. She receives the abundance of life with openness and walks, as Thich Nhat Hanh admonishes, as if her feet are kissing the earth. Fluttering butterflies find rest on her palms and neighbor cats enjoy her soft pets on the porch. In one surrealist shot, she levitates gracefully through the air as if she were a goddess performing a ballet. Much like Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, Mrs. O’Brien can be seen as the Tree of Life herself.6 In another scene, she stops by some men being arrested to give them a drink of water, fulfilling Christ’s golden rule inversion, “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.” (Matthew 25:35)
Apart from her majestic physicality, she delivers little homilies that are paraphrased from Zosima’s admonitions. For example, Zosima says:
“Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.” - Brothers of Karamazov, Book 6
And here is Mrs. O’Brien’s paired-down version:
“Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.” - Tree of Life
In another homily, Mrs. O’Brien whispers:
The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by. Do good to them. Wonder. Hope.
Not only does this one contain Christ’s very words about loving enemies (“do good to them”), but it seems inspired by these words of Zosima:
‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
On the contrary, Mr. O’Brien tells Jack, “You’re mother is naïve. It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world.” The underlying assumption about the purpose for existing in this world in that advice alone reveals much about Mr. O’Brien. Elsewhere, he echoes a certain garden snake, saying, “The world lives by trickery. If you want to succeed, you can’t be too good.”
While Mrs. O’Brien is able to surrender herself to the wonder and terror of life, Mr. O’Brien attempts to hold a firm grasp on control over everything. He dominates his family with constant criticism and squashes the slightest bit of insubordination with swift retribution. He only accepts love on his own terms. During a walkthrough of the yard, pointing out every weed Jack failed to pluck perfectly at the root, Jack suddenly hugs his father. Puzzled and slightly annoyed, Mr. O’Brien goes back to his harsh review. But when he desires the same affection, he either commands it (“Give your father a kiss”) or lobs it upon his subject forcefully, squeezing his sons in prolonged pseudo-hugs while holding them in choke holds. In an inverse of the head blessings and grace-transferring shoulder touches, Mr. O’Brien forcefully pats his sons on the head or clenches the back of their necks, asserting his dominance even as he attempts to express his love.
In the film’s indisputably most uncomfortable scene, a spat of domestic abuse breaks out at the dinner table after R.L. tells his father to “be quiet.” After Brad Pitt’s character forcefully removes the children from the table the scene lingers on the tension between husband and wife as Mrs. O’Brien cleans the table and washes the dishes while Mr. O’Brien airs out repressed grievances, saying, “You turned my own kids against me. You undermine everything I do!” In an uncharacteristic moment of frustrated protest, Mrs. O’Brien feebly reaches toward her husband’s face, saying, “How do you like it?” Before she can hit him, he twists her arm and painfully restrains her. As she attempts to struggle free, he gruffly commands her to “stop it” several times until she surrenders to his dominance and is reduced to helpless tears.
Lest Terrence Malik leave us the impression this is an isolated incident, the subsequent scene follows Jack wandering through his darkened neighborhood, watching another father lash out against his family through a window. The man shouts at his wife, “This is my house! You’re allowed to live here!” The Way of Nature finds its perfect manifestation in the patriarchal and authoritarian family structure of 1950s America.
The same men we’ve witnessed dutifully attending church, we now see cowardly tyrannizing their families. They believe power and wealth make them important. When the family is leaving church one day, Mr. O’Brien finishes talking to a man and then gets in the car boasting, “That's a friend of mine. He owns half the real estate in town.” As the family drives home past expensive houses, he continues:
He started out as a barber. But he built something big. Now you'd think he's the fourth person of the Holy Trinity. They never talk about their money. Wrong people go hungry. Die. Wrong people get loved.
He and his fellow insecure patriarchs, rootless from love, believe that rubbing shoulders with strongmen may hide their own intolerable weaknesses. Admitting and coming to terms with human limitations is out of the question. In one voiceover, he boasts about the twenty-seven patents he has, saying:
“It means ownership. Ownership of ideas. You make yourself what you are. You control your own destiny. You can’t say ‘I can’t.” You say, ‘I’m having trouble. I’m not done yet.’ Can’t say ‘I can’t.’”
It is these two primordial archetypes that play out externally in Jack’s daily life, but with trepidation, he realizes they exist within his own being too. Increasingly, much to his own befuddlement, Jack finds himself having desires and inclinations that lead him to cause harm to objects, others, and himself. It begins innocently enough, with longing stares at a pretty girl in his classroom, but in little time Jack and his friend’s from the street have become neighborhood menaces, breaking windows, treating animals cruelly, and attempting to physically intimidate each-other through wrestling. Like Zosima describing the military regiment of his youth, Jack might claim, “I don't say that we were bad by nature, all these young men were good fellows, but they behaved badly, and I worst of all.” With the typical baseness of a young group of boys, they become each-other’s mutual corruption. At one point, a snide looking child whispers through a tin-can telephone to Jack several comments that evoke the Satan to Eve:
“They’re just trying to scare you. Keep you ignorant.
They say you can’t try stuff. They do.
What do you need to be afraid of? You’re afraid. I see it.
Things ya got to learn. How can know stuff until you look?”
Whether he lurks inside a garden snake or a Texan boy, the Satan seeks to sow distrust and suspicion and compel his hearers to take what they need rather than be given it in God’s time and way. So Jack takes another bite.
One evening, Jack peaks through the windows of a wealthy neighbor’s house and beholds the riches his father so desires, specifically finding the mother of the house’s silk nightgown pleasing to the eye. Jack sneaks into the house when the family is out of town and steals the nightgown. Once outside, he panics, hides it under a board by the river, and then deciding against that, returns to cast it into the river.
This scene is rather baffling until you realize how closely it mirrors Augustine’s sin in his Confessions. Augustine recounts a time in adolescence when he and his friends finished playing in the streets and then decided to steal some pears from a tree. Instead of eating them, they cast them to pigs. He admits that he didn’t steal for “any desire to enjoy the things I stole, but only the stealing of them and the sin.”
When Jack returns to his mother, who seems to have some omnipotent knowledge of his crime, he attempts to dodge her sight, murmuring, "I can't talk to you. Don't look at me." With his fall complete, Jack feels nakedly exposed and hides from the eyes of loving Grace. As if paddling in the depths of a dark sea, Jack laments, “What have I started? What have I done?"
Watching his mother and brother, as if from a million miles away, says, "How do I get back...to where they are?" For those who find themselves operating as the hands and feet of Nature’s malevolence and witnessing people who freely operate in Grace, it can feel like they inhabit some other place entirely.
Adrift between the vastly differing ways of his parents, Jack perhaps summarizes the whole film, as he says:
“Father, Mother…always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.”
Go and Do Likewise
At the beginning of the film, adult Jack complains, “The world’s gone to the dogs.” Most days, it feels like Jack is right. Though these two forces wrestle inside us all, it feels like Nature is winning. I think that’s why Thomas à Kempis chose the word nature and why Malik adopted it for the film. It’s the one that we are more naturally inclined towards, whereas Grace is a matter of choice and intention (though less so over a lifetime of practice).
In a time where admonitions for mercy are mocked by the highest powers in the world, where dominance is sought through authoritarianism, and where the vulnerable are abused in private and public, we might ask like the O’Brien’s priest, “Is there some fraud in the scheme of the universe? Is there nothing which is deathless? Nothing which does not pass away?” As the script raises this question, the cinematography seems to answer it as the camera pans up toward a stained glass Christ.
We hear at the beginning of the film that “no one who loves the way of Grace comes to a bad end,” and yet a primary tension felt by Mrs. O’Brian and the viewer throughout the film is, “Then why did R.L. die young?” We might say the same about Christ, for all his talk about the meek inheriting the land and loving enemies, how’d that work out for him? To this, the film answers: that is not the end. Hear the waves lap up on the beach of that distant shore. Concern yourself not whether literal grains of sand await your feet or whether your love will surpass you on this earth long after you're gone, and answer:
Which way will you choose today?
If you enjoyed this, please like, comment, or share.
As I wrote this, I was constantly running up against more things I wanted to say about this beloved film of mine. Now that I have summarized what I think Tree of Life is about and what its influenced by, I plan to write about it and other Malik films more. What would you be interested to hear about next?
A note about music in the audio version7
If you Google this, the first thing you’re likely to find is a Reddit post written by me (FreeWheelinBay) in 2019. The only literary connection I’ve listed in this post that someone else pointed out to me is how similar Jack’s nightgown theft is to Saint Augustine’s pear theft. Unfortunately, I no longer remember who mentioned this to give them credit.
Though it is often critiqued for having no plot, the Tree of Life actually seems to follow the Heroes’ Journey structure when examined closely. For example, there is a moment when adult Jack begins his metaphysical journey, where he passes through a lone doorframe. This seems to be a literal version of the Crossing the Threshold plot point
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The Bible Project has fantastic videos and podcasts tracking themes throughout the narrative of the Bible. For a short treatment on this, check out their video on Links in Scripture or Ancient Jewish Meditation Literature. For a more in-depth treatment, this episode, Literature for a Lifetime, in their Paradigm podcast series is great.
The words from the sermon, crafted and delivered by a real Episcopal priest, can be found in this article by Christopher Page (towards the end).
Here is the passage from Lewis’ A Grief Observed which originated simply as the journals he wrote after his wife’s passing:
How do they know she is at rest? Why should the separation, if nothing else, which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover that departs. “Because she is in God’s hands.” But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body. If so, why?
“She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed.” (Proverbs 3:18)
I included several songs featured in the film in my voiceover. They are:
Clouds by Alexandre Desplat
Funeral Canticle by John Tavener and performed by the Academy of Ancient Muisc
F. Couperin: Les barricades mystérieuses preformed by Éva Szalai
Emergence of Life by Alexandre Desplat
Morning Prayers by Vasiko Tevdorashvili
I do not own the rights to any of this music
This is the best ToF analysis I have read for sure. I wrote an article arguing that this duality is the key to Malick’s main theme in his filmography. At least, it seems that most of his films parallel aspects of grace/nature motifs in plot lines and characters and symbols. What are your thoughts on this? For example, in the contrast between Western societies and indigenous ones (The Thin Red Line, and The New World); the contrast rural/urban (Song to Song). In a rare interview, Malick said that he wanted to shoot in a small rural town in Mexico in contrast to the American cities because it was more “free”. Another example is the use of machines for control of natural landscapes (The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven). Hollywood debauchery as nature (Knight of Cups). More broadly speaking, I think he is suggesting the modern world maybe the realm of nature and premodern world holds grace. Interestingly, there is most of the times a character that can see or traverse between this “two worlds” ( Captain Smith in The New World, soldier Witt in The Thin Red Line, Jack in ToF, Rick in Knight of Cups, and the small girl in Days of Heaven). I think Malick´s nature way in a broader scope is his own take on what Max Weber's called the disenchantment of the world. I would be happy to collaborate in an article on these topic!
The Tree of Life is my favorite movie and I am so fascinated by the Spiritual aspects of the film. You said everything so perfectly, and I am favoriting this article! I know you have a poll to choose one topic, but please do them all. I can't wait to hear what you have to say!